


Flying Blind

by EnglishLanguage



Category: Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Uprising
Genre: Developing Friendships, Featuring, Gen, Random & Short, Temporary Amnesia, and Beck's gorgeous inner monologue, happy July 9th
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:22:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage
Summary: Fact one: Beck can't orient himself.Fact two: he's afraid.Fact three: his memory files are an unmitigated wreck, because that’s just the kind of luck he has.
Relationships: Beck & Tron (Tron)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 50





	Flying Blind

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this random piece sitting around in my docs for months now, but I figured I should post something for July 9th, so. Enjoy.

Beck whirls around, feels his jaw go slack. 

“Users glitch i—”

* * *

Fact one: Beck can’t orient himself.

Can’t figure out where he is. Can’t understand _why_ he doesn’t know where he is—his code won’t connect to Argon’s circuit map; his navigational heuristics are wound up, coiled into a stubborn knot of data.

Fact two: he’s afraid.

_Of what?_

_(Unknown.)_

_Is that why I’m running?_

_(Unknown.)_

Fact three: his memory files are an unmitigated wreck, because that’s just the kind of luck he has.

It's possible the files are deactivated. Except it feels like his disc is in place, solid and warm and _real_ against his shoulders. More likely? His memories are damaged. Corroded. 

_Why?_

_(Still unknown, Beck, just shut up and run and actually stopstopstopyouaretippingover—)_

He slams to a halt against an alleyway wall, two hands snagging against the glossy surface—and would you look at that, he’s wearing gloves; there are grips on the palms. He breathes. Makes sure his feet are positioned underneath him, and not running ahead, not tripping over themselves. He needs to recalibrate.

Needs to stop for more than a nanocyc and figure out where he is, what he’s doing here.

_Think._

Gloves. He’s wearing gloves, white gloves, and the fingers are stiff with plating _(makes it more difficult to draw your disc, remember?)_. So he isn’t Beck at the moment. He’s the Renegade. And abruptly, the nagging alert prickling up through his circuity takes on new urgency, a more bitter flavor. It connects to names and faces and vague recollections, but _it’s still not enough._

Escaping from Pavel requires different tactics than escaping from Paige or Tesler, and Beck doesn’t know who's after him; he doesn’t know anything, _users—_

_Stand up._

_(Equilibrium impaired. 68% functionality.)_

_Run._

_Find a quiet place. Switch off the Renegade’s disc. Shut down—_

That doesn’t sound correct. He can’t shut down, not here, not now.

_Shut down._

He pushes off the wall, stumbles down the length of the alley, watches the floor buck beneath his feet. It’s too quiet here, too empty of other programs, of crowds, of—

_What’s going on? Need to stop. Need rest._

_(Incorrect.)_

Beck shakes his head, and his vision trickles cold out of his ears. Goes blurry. _(Hurts.)_ But he can’t stop—if he remembers nothing else, he has to hold on to the fact that he cannot stop moving. Fact one: he’s lost. Fact two: he’s afraid, with good reason. Fact three: his memory is gone. He can’t trust himself. Can’t trust anything.

_Fact one. Fact two. Fact three._

_Run._

He turns a corner. Correction: pulls himself around a corner, hands tight on the edge of a building, something in his knee going limp, running red-hot and sick down to the ends of his foot. Which doesn’t matter. He steps forward. Steps again. Steps—

_“Hmf!”_

“Beck?”

Sensation—dull, solid, more pressure than pain—condenses in his chest. There are arms around him, holding him still. Pinning him.

 _“Beck._ It’s me. Stop fighting, stop—”

Beck processes the voice, the words, too late to check his counterattack, and an elbow plants itself sharply in Tron’s abdomen. To his credit, the security program holds rigid against the strike, absorbing it, and he bites back any protest more extreme than a stifled grunt. 

“What?” Beck’s throat pinches shut, and he chokes on his own fear. “What’re you doing here?”

He can’t see Tron _(he’s behind you, out of sight; is that safe?),_ but he feels the program’s exasperated sigh, a burst of warm air billowing over the frigid circuits lining the back of Beck’s helmet. He feels Tron’s arms, too, locked tight around his stomach, and the breadth of Tron’s chest—all hard, ridged armor and sudden edges—against his back, and _yes, I think it’s safe here._

Beck’s processes whir to an exhausted halt.

“Wha’s going on?”

He blinks. Shifts his jaw. And, yeah, turns out that’s what it feels like when his mouth moves; that really was Beck’s voice, Beck’s question. It’s weird how distant, how hazy, the words sounded.

_(Audial input impaired. Damage report invalid.)_

_Glitch it._

“You don’t know?” Tron asks, thinly. And his voice, unlike Beck’s is extremely close to Beck’s ear, and too loud, and carried _hot_ on his breath. 

Beck rolls the reply to Tron’s question around his tongue, lets it drop out of his mouth like a weight: “no.”

“I see.” Fingers press into Beck’s disc, and everything—the white armor, his helmet—deactivates in a smooth ripple of energy.

Beck’s resolve to stay on his feet is the next thing to go. “No idea at all,” he rambles. “Where are we?” And _yeah,_ the floor looks really nice. Never mind that it’s some random alleyway, or that there are Occupation soldiers following him. Tron is here. Beck will be fine. That’s the end of it.

Tron catches him under the arms as he slumps, and something locks out and aches in Beck’s shoulders. “You can let go’f me,” he croaks, feeling his voice tip into an involuntary whine. He reads a clear _no chance of that, Beck,_ in the way Tron spits out an exhale like an insult. Instead of dropping him, the security program drags Beck to the wall, lets him recline against and slide down it.

“You’re injured.”

Hands _(moving too fast, and the fingers are slender, twitchy, like Gridbugs)_ brush over the sides of Beck’s jaw. Which hurts. There’s something bloated and hot pressing in on his chin and cheeks; if Tron keeps poking at it, Beck’s face might… pop. Deflate.

_Sounds about right._

He bats Tron’s hands away, tries to blink. Patches of white light, smeared with dizzying color, flicker across his visual field. 

“Beck, focus on me. You aren’t thinking straight.” _That’s news._ “You’re very close to deresolution.”

More fingers, trailing over his forehead, snagging on a line of jagged voxels.

_Ow._

“‘M not… thinking straight?”

_Fact three, remember?_

“No. Up—”

Beck lets Tron drag him to his feet, and now that he’s really paying attention to the pain, he can _feel_ it. It’s not unlike water, shedding off his shoulders and only just starting to soak through his gridsuit, down to skin. There’s liquid heat in the back of his throat, burning his chest. And something pulsing, splintered, in his worn-raw chin, in his jaw, his teeth. Something _shifting_ deep inside his abdomen. 

They turn a corner, and Tron yanks Beck onto his feet as his knees shake, nearly giving out. “Got hit by something. Knocked stuff loose,” Beck mutters. Which makes sense. It explains the injuries, the holes in his memories, the blind terror burning an electrical storm through his circuitry. “You came to help me?”

Tron hesitates halfway through a step, but Beck keeps going, nearly keels over onto his face. He’s pretty sure Tron’s silence is the equivalent of an affirmative response.

Beck lets his eyes slide shut. “Who’s chasing us?”

“Pavel.”

“Where is he?”

“Not far behind,” Tron replies, which doesn’t sound ideal, but— “he won’t find us. I’ve got you.”

Beck nods against Tron’s shoulder, forehead chafing against armor. He tries to say _thank you,_ but the words won’t take shape between his teeth—

_Shut down initiated._

* * *

Tron’s base is brilliant, a beacon of light and hope and _home._

And—users above—it’s entirely too bright.

“Ligh’s,” Beck mumbles, draping an arm across his face. He can feel his subroutines coming online slowly, in cautious steps, and winces as a couple of them flicker, fail to line up correctly. The white-hot brilliance leaking in past the edges of his elbow dims, turns more silver-grey than blue. “Least you didn’t take me to the garage, huh? My friends wouldn’t react well to finding a strange program in my room. No—forget my friends—Able would chase you out with a lightbike baton. And I’d have to pick up extra shifts for a centicycle.”

“I’m not afraid of Able.”

 _Well._ Tron doesn’t know Able. So Beck will have to forgive him for making such an ignorant claim.

“Everything hurts,” Beck mentions, in lieu of any real question. A rapid scan, full-body, indicates there’s a lattice of fractures streaking through his body, from one, hazy eye to his left foot. Which aches, riddled with distorted glitches. 

There’s something misfiring, lagging, in his left knee, and that _burns._

“Memories?” Tron queries.

“So-so.” Beck twitches, tilts his head to the side, as if he could shake his addled, aching memories into place. 

The security program nods, bites his lip. Sighs. “You were on a mission,” he explains, and there’s a sudden weight at the edge of Beck’s bunk (correction: the bunk he’s borrowing, and he has no idea _whose_ it is, but it better not be Tron’s) as the program sits down. “As far as I can figure out, Pavel hit you with a tank.”

“Sounds a little embarrassing.” Beck screws his eyes shut against a wave of fluttering pain. “But yeah, that feels about right.”

“I found you running around, half-derezzed and already crashing, with no idea where you were or where you wanted to go. You led Pavel on a very _interesting_ chase through the warehouses on the coast.”

Fatigue hits Beck like… well, like a tank. It scatters his thoughts and leaves him winded, breathless. He manages a frail “I bet,” and lets Tron pry his arm away from his face, run a scan through the healing wound running down the left side of his face. The path of Tron’s fingertips, as he traces the injury, gets very close to Beck’s eye—and no, he doesn’t like that, not at all.

_Close call, hm?_

_Glitching Pavel._

He blinks, squeezes his eyes closed just to remind himself he’s still got two of them, and they work fine. 

Tron’s fingers wanders down to Beck’s chin, tips it up. His hands are… strangely gentle. It shouldn’t surprise Beck, but it does.

Tron’s hands are gentle, and not effortlessly so, in the way that Mara’s are. He’s not so delicate that a light touch comes naturally—Beck has _seen_ his mentor tear programs to voxels—but it somehow means more to him that Tron has to put so much deliberate effort into softening himself. 

“Tron, how did I get here? I remember shutting off—”

“I carried you,” Tron replies, a little curtly. His jaw is clenched painfully tight. “You’ll heal fine. No lasting damage.”

Abruptly, Beck remembers the moment Tron found him. And maybe the memory is a little stained, its colors and sounds too fuzzy to comprehend, but Beck recalls the instinct, rooted deep in his code, that fired through his circuitry.

_Tron is safe. You’re safe._

_Huh._

“Thank Flynn,” he says, awkwardly patting at Tron’s elbow. A short laugh jumps in his chest. “See, I’d _really_ hate to miss a training session—”

“Quiet, Beck,” Tron scolds, but a soft _something_ flashes behind his eyes, clearing away thick exhaustion.

Beck bites back on a grin.

Tank aside, he thinks this counts as one more victory for the Renegade.


End file.
